


The Man From The Waves

by onnenlintu



Series: Joutenveden Tytöt [3]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Kasvatus-verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 18:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16603634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Final work of the mini-trilogy. The Known World is discovered, and two sisters find themselves ready to discover a world unknown to them.





	1. Chapter 1

Aase’s morning had already been slightly too eventful.  
  
She still had to repress her shock when one of the dogs killed a threat to the flock like that. Even if immunity in pure Icelandic sheepdogs had been stable for five years now - a third of her lifetime - the earliest of her conditioning was that any animal but a cat or sheep was liable to turn once a troll’s blood touched it, and she was sure that as long as she lived that unease would never fade. Knokler was impeccably trained, though, and her command to stay away from the house while the disease on his chin faded kept him back as surely as a fence.  
  
It should have been obvious something was going to happen that afternoon, when her and Knokler’s walk down the fjord and along the beach had the dog even more agitated than usual. She barely registered the boat in the bay at first, so used to the sight of a sail in the summer sun, but when Knokler turned to bark at it again she had to do a double-take. Was it some strange Icelandic thing, perhaps? She’d never seen any boat quite like it. As it became closer, what she’d originally taken for a normal dragonhead started to look more and more obviously strange.  
  
The glint of waves in the bright bay forced her to blink when she peered more closely. Aase realised the thing on the prow was not a dragon at all, but some kind of monstrous face, with cheeks carved in swirls and a tongue bared as if to insult all before it. The upper sides of the boat, too, were carved in thick lines that swirled and formed points like spearheads. As the boat closed the last distance between it and the shore, she noticed that parts of the woodwork were studded with tiny shards of some substance she was sure she’d never seen, which gleamed like a pond catching the last purple-blue streaks of the sunrise.  
  
Knokler had backed up close to her and continued to bark, and she put a hand on his head to shush him as the boat dropped anchor just short of running aground. It made no sense to respond to this with stillness and quiet, as if they were some kind of troll, but something held her in place. She could only watch in silence as an athletic-looking man climbed partway onto the prow of the boat, dramatically shucking off a huge, bright feather cloak and dropping it on the deck before leaping all the way from the rail to the water.  
  
When his powerful swimming had covered the short distance to the shallows, he stood up, and Aase couldn’t work out what part of his appearance to process first. The fantastic cloak he’d left behind and the intensity of his dripping-wet expression were only the beginning. His dark, bright-eyed face was covered from the cheekbones down, dense tattooing that looked very much like the carvings on his ship. It was unlike anything she’d seen before in her life.  
  
His eyes locking on her kept her stock-still as he splashed his way towards her, clear little waves licking up his legs as he emerged onto the land. Aase felt like she couldn’t run now, and when she found herself face-to-face with the man, Knokler lay down at her feet and whined with uncertainty.  
  
Behind the man, Aase noticed others beginning to jump out of the boat. There were many of them, men and women, most looking more like the first man than like any other person she’d known. Now that they were face to face, even through the shock, she felt like she detected a hint of awkwardness in this stranger. After a deep breath, he spoke.  
  
_“Kia ora.”_  
  
“Uh.” Aase didn’t know what to make of it. “Hey?” Perhaps she should be terrified. “Do you speak Icelandic?” It wouldn’t help that much if he did, given hers was so poor, but this was all her experience provided as a possible response.  
  
_“Kauri.”_ He was pointing at himself. A name?  
  
Aase’s brain finally caught up to the facts of the situation. She was on the beach, alone but for her dog and a man who looked like no person she'd ever seen before. The higher-level fact - that these people might be a bit beyond the realm of foreigners you needed to speak Icelandic, or even Russian, to - finally percolated into the sensible part of her thought processes.  
  
“Oh, gods. Oh. Oh, _shit_.”  
  
**********  
  
“Fa-a- _aaack me_!” Kauri pressed his forehead against the glass of the window and pretended not to notice when the ginger man guarding them jumped at the sound of him raising his voice. “Hana, how many days have we been in here now?”  
  
“Seven.” Hana replied in the language she’d been conversing in, rather than the one Kauri had addressed her in. While the language of their mission had officially been _te reo Māori,_ Hana and Declan had both come from families that spoke English at home, and nobody had really minded them speaking it to each other. It wasn’t as if they were totally excluding anyone, given that even the crew members from the other islands did at least understand it well enough. Vainui, as the group’s only Tahitian, was the most left out by it. She was sound asleep, though, probably taking the most sensible approach to this wait of any of them. Taika and Mahiriki were also doing much better than Kauri was, even if their forty-third game of tic-tac-toe looked like it was getting extremely old.  
  
“Feels like seven _years_.”  
  
Hana raised one hand in a gesture that said _and what do you expect me to do about that?_ Turning to face Kauri properly, she committed to the conversation by answering him in the same language. “If they’re still using old-fashioned quarantining we’ve got seven more. _You_ agreed it was better to avoid making them nervous too.”  
  
“That was _seven days ago_. And I thought we’d agreed that being first mate means you let me whinge?”  
  
“For the definition of ‘agreeing’ that I have to do, because of being your first mate.”  
  
“Well, there you go!”  
  
“Your whingeing is very important. Feel seen.”  
  
Kauri narrowed his eyes at her for a moment. Close enough. He turned to stare through the window again. Another of these people - the map had named this place as _Norway_ , so they were probably Norwayers, but who could say what had changed in over a hundred years? - had come in to talk to their usual guard.  
  
Their language was a strange one. At times, especially in the writing on the few signs he’d seen here, Kauri felt like it was frustratingly close enough to some kind of mangled English that he should be able to work it out. It wasn’t just him, either. When Hana had finally reached the point of despair at the standard of heating, giving up and acting on the nigh-universal irrational urge to speak one’s native language slowly to uncomprehending foreigners, the guard had repeated _“Kald?”_ back to them with obvious surprise. The information relayed had been clearly understood the same way on both sides. Kauri had an extra blanket now to prove it. However, communication beyond the odd _“kald”_ and _“varm”_ apparently remained impossible.  
  
The freezing “summer” days, enough to make Kauri question what he logically knew about the seasons being reversed here, were not the only difference between here and the south Pacific. Kauri had met some pretty pale pākehā before - even among the people on this voyage, with Declan having so many freckles and blue flecks in his eyes - but every day here it seemed that he met yet another person who could freshly take the title of “blondest person he’d ever seen”. The Norwayers’ hair was often so wispy and light Kauri had to look twice to even be sure they had eyebrows.  
  
Despite the strangeness of the people and language, the land they’d traveled across before reaching this town had felt in some ways familiar. The craggy, forested sounds of the coastline were enough to make Kauri abruptly miss home in a way he hadn’t for his whole time at sea. It was a deeply bizarre experience to walk through woods that should have been the realm of Tāne, and even looked a lot like the land he kept closest, and yet not feel him in quite the way Kauri remembered. No taniwhā curled into the depths of these cliff-shadowed bays, and whilst birds and trees followed their usual ways in every land, here some other god kept them. Now, in this state of unceremonious quarantine, it was hard to feel the touch of gods at all. With all this free time to think, Kauri had to wonder what the knowledge of the sea that had brought him into his magic even meant, this far from home.  
  
The woman talking excitedly to the guard looked a little familiar, small and pear-shaped with short blond hair partly held back by a bright woven band. Kauri wasn’t sure if it was just how similar a lot of the people here looked, or whether she’d been one of the ones he’d met on the way into being quarantined. Whatever she was telling the guard, she was extremely pleased about it.  
  
The door was being opened, and it wasn’t a mealtime. The guard and the new woman were starting some kind of conversation, clearly angling for some kind of response. Vainui woke up with her usual sense of barely having noticed she’d fallen asleep, and the whole crew stared at the babbling in utter incomprehension, until one word caught all their attention at once.  
  
“Radio?” Hana repeated it back at them with a real hopefulness. Kauri didn’t know who on earth these people would have even thought to call, but if they were trying to call _someone_ , then that was at least making an effort towards something other than letting them stew.  
  
“Radio!” The blond lady repeated the word again.  
  
“Radio!” The crew echoed her a third time, all sitting up.  
  
After this moment of understanding, there was a small pause while the two Norwayers looked awkwardly at each other. At least the beckoning was hard to misinterpret, and when the whole crew insisted on coming together, the Norwayers responded only with an insistent effort to escort them in a tight group towards the room where they kept their communications. Kauri definitely remembered the woman who came to oversee it all, tall and well into an obviously battle-scarred middle age, because she’d insisted on repeating her name again every time they’d met. To be fair to this Sigrun, it did help a bit, given all the new people they were meeting.  
  
It was packed in that radio room, and half the crew were pressed tight against the walls. The rig was massive for its probable purpose, but the voice did come through amazingly clearly, even if it was even purer nonsense than even the Norwegian they’d heard so far. The blond woman who’d picked them up spoke to whoever was on the other end in a patter as fast and trilling as a flock of budgies, then gestured Kauri over with a hopeful look. When Kauri placed the earphones over his head and opened with “Alright?”, the voice cut off abruptly, as if whoever was speaking had been taken aback.    
  
After a few seconds, it tentatively began again. _“Hello? Do you understand me?”_  
  
For all that the words were unmistakably, miraculously English, this mystery girl had managed to fit a lot of bizarre pronunciation into one sentence already. Interpreting ten more minutes of this already seemed like it would be a pain. Kauri took off his earphones. “Hana! _English!_ ”  
  
Letting his first mate slide into the chair he’d just vacated, he stepped back. Hana was placing the headphones over her fluffy hair and speaking. “Hello? Yes, I understand you. Please speak up a bit - ”  
  
As he’d suspected, the exchange took a while. Hana had to repeat herself every other sentence. “Six of us - _six_ , like four-five-six - yes, we do need an interpreter - oh yes, I should introduce myself too, Hana speaking! Nice to meet you, Tuuri - no worries mate, we’re good as gold! We’ve got a week left in quarantine anyway - yep - okay. Alright, much appreciated - and which one’s your sister?”  
  
Hana’s final move was to hand the headphones back to the blond woman before looking at Kauri with bright eyes. “So this one’s sister in uh, Finland is coming to help us out. Did you even remember that place existed?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary:
> 
> Kia ora! - A greeting, literally "be well". 
> 
> Te reo Māori - the Maori language
> 
> Pākehā - white New Zealanders
> 
> Tāne - god of forests and birds
> 
> Taniwhā - a powerful water creature which may be malevolent, but which is also often regarded as a guardian by those native to its territory who keep to the correct rules.


	2. Chapter 2

The whole situation had moved very quickly beyond Viivi’s hands, but Sigrun had still let her join the welcome party for Tuuri’s arrival at the nearest station. “You’ll have to point her out for us anyway, right?”   
  
Sigrun had been entirely correct. The men who’d accompanied the excursion had been peering at a random woman, puzzling over whether her variety of ‘short and blonde’ was similar enough to Viivi’s for them to probably be sisters, when Tuuri had finally emerged from a far carriage. Within a second of recognising the lanky limbs and long black curls of hair, Viivi shouted loud enough to catch her sister’s attention, and Tuuri matched her with a near-incoherent sound of excitement. Dropping her luggage, Tuuri raced down the platform, nearly tripping over her own legs as she skidded to a halt. Her trajectory was barely slowed down enough to avoid bowling Viivi over as they hugged.   
  
“My sweet and beautiful sister!” Tuuri draped the full weight of her torso over the top of Viivi’s head. _“Now show me the foreigners.”_   
  
“Technically, here, _we_ are both foreigners.” Viivi’s voice was muffled, her nose very firmly crushed against her allegedly little sister’s breastbone.  
  
“Welcome to Norway!” Viivi felt her face liberated as Sigrun pried them apart, pushing her to the side and offering a hand to Tuuri. “You speak Swedish, yeah?”  
  
Viivi counted down the seconds, waiting for Sigrun to notice the same accent Viivi herself had come here with, and got to about fifteen before Sigrun started with the laughter. Tuuri didn’t seem to know what to do with being told she sounded like a middle-aged man from Östersund. Viivi made a mental note to take her aside later and give her a small talk about what Sigrun meant by things.  
  
The chance to do that would not come for some time, though. The moment they arrived back at base, Tuuri was whisked away to do some important translating, and Viivi was on her way back to work. Stashing Tuuri’s bag near her bunk, Viivi resigned herself to getting only a second-hand account of the exciting happenings. At least they’d get to catch up at length later on, when Tuuri got one of the remaining bunks near hers.   
  
When Viivi finally reached the storehouse, she found that the day’s work was almost done. She had very few shifts doing the lifting and carrying everyone participated in, but had been here long enough to know well where everything went. It was kind of annoying how quickly everything was finished, given she’d had to leave Tuuri to go do it. She didn’t know where they’d gone, though, and getting in the way wouldn’t be useful even if she had known. With the hour or so she had free, she decided it would be a good time to see if anyone had put the targets up by the south wall.   
  
When she worked in the field, Viivi hunted trolls mostly with a gun, but there was something about the self-powered nature and natural quietness of the bow that still compelled her to practise with it whenever she could. Dropping by her room, she picked up the short recurve she’d acquired last year and a stash of arrows. When she reached the practise area at the edge of the base, she did indeed find a battered target still hanging by the wall. Even more luckily, the little machine that tossed targets into the air was sitting there under its tarp, and when she uncovered it she found there was plenty of power left.   
  
As Viivi started the machine up and loaded it with a few dozen of the dented little plates, passing soldiers stopped at a safe distance to watch her. When the machine’s whirr reached a peak, Viivi ran backwards, drawing an arrow from her side and loosing a shot that met its target in the air with a high ringing. Viivi moved from side to side in front of the machine, taking a shot every few seconds, and when she finally missed one she heard her small audience call out to her. “Ooh! Disappointing, Viivi!”. The arrow that had gone awry buried itself near the wall.   
  
Viivi ignored the friendly jibing and focused on her practise, hitting another target with a bright _ding_ that rang around the wide courtyard. The machine ran out of plates and she refilled it. Time was marked as the height at which the sun caught those plates shifted slightly, and the people watching Viivi got bored and moved on. She had been doing this for over an hour, and Tuuri would likely be done soon. Packing everything up, Viivi headed back towards her room, and barely had time to hang her bow up again before her door cracked open. “Tuuri! You’re done?”  
  
“Oh, that was so much.” Tuuri came in and shut the door behind her, leaning back on it for a moment before starting to take her shoes off. “I’m just gonna sit down for a moment.”  
  
“You do that.” Viivi sat on her bed, pulling her legs in close to herself to give Tuuri enough space to sit down beside her. When Tuuri followed, tucking her legs up off the floor to match, Viivi noticed there was a real air of nervousness to her. “I bet you did great.”  
  
“You were right, they’re not always speaking the same language. I can't do all of it.” Tuuri fiddled with her hair. “I don’t think the guy wanted to speak English very much. Especially not for the uh, reciting he wanted to do? He wanted to tell Sigrun about the um, warrior achievements of his ancestors, and how many people they fed in their house, and stuff. Apparently it’s tradition. She didn’t seem to mind?”  
  
“Honestly, that sounds exactly like what she would do herself if she landed somewhere, and she doesn’t even have a tradition saying to.”  
  
“It was so hard to explain, I never realised how much Swedish I’m missing for some stuff, and they speak… _differently_ to the recordings I heard.” Tuuri was still clearly troubled, now staring at her hands. “I felt like Emil looked when that tractor guy came from Kajaani. You remember that?”  
  
“Oh, yeah! Think about it though, at least you didn’t feel how Reynir looked!” Viivi wished she could think of a better way to say she was in awe of Tuuri doing so well with it.   
  
Tuuri laughed at the memory of watching Reynir’s face go totally blank when he heard a strange dialect of Finnish. “I guess that's true. Anyway, they said they’re from - Viivi it’s on the _other side of the world_ , can you believe it?”  
  
“You skipped a bit there.”  
  
“They’re from the _South Pacific_!” Tuuri pronounced _Pacific_ with the careful excitement of having learned it just today. “It’s part of a huge sea - like this, they drew a map.” She indicated a vaguely-shaped globe in the air. “We’re here, right? Like the distance from Norway to Finland would be just _this_ little gap, and then you’d have to go all the way over _here_ \- and almost the whole half on the other side is this big ocean - and they’re _here_.” Her final finger movement was right through her imaginary globe, indicating a place that was about as far away from Norway as it seemed possible to be. Viivi couldn’t quite wrap her mind around it. She’d felt like she was crossing the world even coming from Joutenvesi to Norway.  
  
“So they just sailed here?”  
  
“I guess they did.” Tuuri’s chance to explain what she’d learned had lifted most of the tightness from her shoulders, and now she was back to her usual self, her face lighting up as she tried to picture what a journey it had been. “I really can’t imagine it, I don’t think most of them are any older than you - oh, and they said tomorrow they’d tell us about some of the stuff they saw on the way! They had a picture with them of a mage, a little old lady with black hair, and she had the biggest kind of cat I’ve _ever_ seen - bigger than a lynx, covered with stripes, and - ”   
  
Viivi heard the base’s loudest bell strike her dinner hour and held up a finger to pause Tuuri. “I definitely want to hear about this. But we should move before the horde of men here eat everything.”  
  
“I meant to ask actually, why are there so many guys on this base? Not that I would complain, I guess it would make the odds good...”  
  
“Not so much. No offence, but how did you grow up in our family and never learn what the Norwegian army is known for?”  
  
“Eh? The only thing I ever heard was a story about them coming to Keuruu for a few weeks one summer and - Oh! _Oh_. Wow, I did not need for that to start making sense in the way it does.”   
  
“Try not to picture it too hard if any of them casually tell you they’ve _been to Finland._ Look, if we get into the dinner hall in time, they have about five more kinds of fruit than you ever get in Saimaa, and I want to know what you think of mandarins - ”   
  
Viivi cut in line ahead of a small group of forty-something men, swiped a mandarin and the last of the good meat with a cheerful “Thanks, Yngve!” thrown back over her shoulder, then took Tuuri to the end spot on one of the many long tables.   
  
Putting the mandarin between the two of them, she started to peel it with her thumbnail. “So about this massive cat from the mage picture.”   
  
Among Tuuri’s many talents was the ability to speak with her mouth very full without losing any of the food. In between brief pauses to swallow, she began to tell Viivi more of the story. “We didn’t get to talk about it much because Kauri - that’s the tall guy - was going on so much about how mad this woman was for living ‘within 200 kilometers of the Singapore zone’, but I did learn there’s a lot of these cats - the _tigers_ \- on those islands, and the mages do everything with one around - ”   
  
***********  
  
Sigrun liked these newcomers a great deal. It had only been a week since she’d had her first conversation - translated, of course - with their leader Kauri, and she was already wishing that their island was easier to visit. She and Kauri’s very first conversation had been about his family’s troll-hunting prowess, and their priorities had only seemed more well-aligned as she learned more. He seemed to understand her perfectly when she said she’d like to fight trolls together, and his entire team were surely cut from much the same cloth, if they really had travelled this far and lived.   
  
It was a pity Sigrun’s many injuries had finally started really acting up in the last five years or so. She suspected she was now slightly too slow to keep up with them. Nonetheless, she had decided quite quickly that the ideal outcome was none of them ever leaving.  
  
Young Tuuri - Sigrun could never stop mentally referring to the new translator without a qualifier - had told her one day that Kauri wanted to show her a dance that was also some kind of challenge. “I’m sure I don't quite understand what he means by challenge”, she’d whispered, her hesitation obvious. “I didn’t know the word _haka_ , and that’s the only extra explanation I got, and I don’t want to be responsible for some kind of miscommunication…”  
  
Sigrun had waved her concern off and asked to see it. Her reward had been the sight of Kauri and a couple of his crewmates performing a stiff-limbed series of motions that seemed more like a very energetic warm-up than any dance she’d seen. She understood quickly what the point was, despite whatever context was missing. Even with no knowledge of these people’s magic, she had felt the presence of something important as the mead-hall filled with the rhythmic shouting. Seeing the quivering tension of the dancers’ muscle, the shiver of their arms as they slapped their chests, left her skin tingling. The tattoos on Kauri’s face creased as he stuck out his tongue. There was a joy to watching it, not unlike the joy of watching a whale’s powerful tail effortlessly throw water into the air. Sigrun knew she would not forget this.  
  
As they slapped their thighs and shouted a final time, the mouth-twisting force of their words cut through her like a sea wind, leaving a shiver running up her spine just as surely. When they were done, Sigrun had watched them for a moment, taking in the sight of their chests still heaving.   
  
“I’m impressed.”  
  
Tuuri had been equally entranced by the sight in front of her, and jumped a little when Sigrun spoke. “Do you want me to translate that? I mean, do you think it’s the right reaction?”  
  
“It had better be, because it’s the one I’m having. Tell them I’m glad they showed me, or I’m honoured, or something like that.”   
  
Judging by Kauri’s face when that was translated, it was exactly the right reaction. Sigrun had once again felt the warm glow of getting to know a kindred spirit, and wondered why she didn’t know any dances that let you flex that much. The few other soldiers who had been around when it happened all looked like they might be wondering the same thing.   
  
Now the whole crew of them had come back again, asking to meet with her in the hall again, as a group. Young Tuuri sat beside Sigrun, a little pile of paper and a pen in front of her, ready to note down any words she was learning as she went. She’d settled into the role she’d been given here remarkably quickly. Sigrun had been relieved to find out Young Tuuri had been working away from home even before she’d been called to do this. That, and the fact her sister was here already, made Sigrun feel much less worryingly responsible for her.   
  
Kauri was sitting opposite Sigrun, leaning on his elbows with his eyebrows arranged into something that indicated knots of thought forming in his brain. He was speaking to his second-in-command, Hana, a young woman Sigrun had not had the chance to speak to much. Young Tuuri wasn’t translating it yet, but soon Kauri did address her, and the translation was something Sigrun had hoped she wouldn’t be hearing for a while.   
  
“He says he thinks they’ve talked to enough reporters, and they want to go home soon, and - ” Young Tuuri broke off her sentence to listen to more, asking a few clarifying questions before turning back to Sigrun. “They want to know if there’s something, or someone, they can bring back to show where they’ve been. Preferably some _one_.”   
  
“Oh. Who?” Sigrun was never sure who to speak to when this kind of translated conversation was happening. Hana seemed to catch what Sigrun said without translation, and started speaking immediately to Young Tuuri again.   
  
“Um, she says she wants to be clear that they don’t necessarily need a person to come with them, historical records and stuff about how we run things would also be appreciated, but if someone _wants_ to - anyone who thinks they can survive the journey, and understands how long it is and still wants to go, anyone like that works.”  
  
Sigrun felt a rare instance of deep regret for how heavily battered her leg had gotten three summers ago. “Gods, that sounds amazing.” Young Tuuri’s quick translation, and Kauri’s face lighting up, was close to actually upsetting. Despite being perpetually not entirely convinced of her own mortality, Sigrun remembered how badly it had nearly gone when she’d last tried to keep up with uninjured people in their twenties, and as much as it stung she had to admit it might be a bad idea to go that far. “Sorry, Tuuri, tell them I meant it sounded good in theory - I’m not going to hack it, though. If you ask the people on this base, though, they’ll find someone to make me jealous of. I’m sure.”  
  
After relaying that, Young Tuuri paused before giving an answer. The hesitation this time was one that bordered visibly on excitement. “They want to know if anyone will understand them without me.”  
  
Sigrun thought about it. “There are others who speak this language, yes? I remember someone did come from Bornholm to interview them, and they had no trouble.”   
  
“She was a lot older than me. And has kids at home, I think.” Young Tuuri shifted, looking exactly like a child who was unsure if they’d be scolded for requesting more cake.   
  
Sigrun looked at the group of people arranged in front of her, and at the young woman - young, bright, but not at all a soldier - waiting for her reaction. “I guess you’re not likely to find anyone who doesn’t need that help. We’re gonna have to think about what to do.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Haka" is a dance mostly known outside New Zealand as a dance used to intimidate one's enemies before battle, and various battle-preparation hakas do exist throughout the Pacific Islands, but it is also a dance done as a form of greeting or respect. It's extremely expressive, the intense physicality of it making it a very visceral connection to the culture. There's a viral video online of people dancing a haka at a wedding, in which the bride is moved to tears by it, which might give some insight into its use outside of the commonly understood "war challenge" aspect. I recommend finding a few on youtube to watch, if you've never seen one. I think it's fair to say Sigrun would likely be very into it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While writing this chapter, I became oddly aware of the difference between the Viivi and Tuuri we originally met and the ones we see now - Viivi was an orphan on a dock! Tuuri was a half-naked baby who Onni was trying to clean up after! It's weird to have handled them for this much "time"...

“It’s not _just_ that Onni would implode if I let you go without me. It makes sense. I’m not useless in a fight, you know.”   
  
“But you already seemed so happy here.” Tuuri didn’t feel like Viivi was lying to her when she said she’d happily go too, but given the size of what they might be undertaking together, it paid to be sure. She was still herself very on edge about the whole idea. She’d told Mum she was sure to be back before Kekri, which was far from the most compelling reservation she could be having, but still wasn’t nothing. Nor was the fact Onni, and most of the others, would implode at least a bit no matter who went with her.   
  
“I’m happy because I get to do a lot of interesting stuff here. Following you is about the most interesting thing I could be doing anywhere. Don’t think I’m just trying to babysit you.”   
  
“Not even a little?”   
  
“If we’re going to talk about it like this, think - can you imagine what would happen if I tried to go home without you?” Viivi crossed her arms. “I don’t even have a choice. I’d still go if I did have one. But are you really going to leave me to that?”   
  
“I’m sure they’d understand?” Tuuri wasn’t sure of that at all, and in fact thought Viivi had a very fair point, but wanted to hear her say she was sure one more time.   
  
“Onni would have been crying for weeks before I even got back. And Reynir would be collecting all those tears in a bucket, so he could drown me in it for making them happen. And then Jaana would resurrect me just to - ”   
  
Viivi trailed off when Tuuri started laughing, a raucous snort that only grew as she vividly pictured Reynir even trying to premeditate something like that, much less fight his way past Emil and actually do it. “Okay! I know what you mean, it’s true.”   
  
“Of course it is. So, we have a week to get to telling everyone where we’re going, assuming Sigrun agrees it makes sense…”   
  
“Oh, we’d better find a good radio slot for that. How are we going to get them close to a chatting radio, though?”   
  
“I’m sure we can get their attention somehow. They’re likely listening to the news…”   
  
********   
  
Tuuri clutched her shawl around her. The day chosen for leaving had turned out to be one of summer’s grimmest, and besides, the luck doubtless knitted into the fabric was good to have close at times like this. Reynir never fully explained what went into the things he made, but everyone knew that there was more to the magic than a little extra waterproofing. The nervousness building up inside her had started to make her feel a little like she was merely watching herself get on this boat, so the fabric’s animal scratchiness was a reassuring touch on her neck and arms.   
  
Sigrun stood on the dock, watching the final loading of provisions with an expression Tuuri might have called wistful. She’d half monopolised the slot Viivi and Tuuri had managed to get two days ago, talking to Jaana and Emil at great length about how skilled Viivi had become under her oversight. The bragging seemed to be taken in the reassuring way it was intended, to the extent that any reassurance could truly work in this situation. Tuuri’s heart had twisted hearing her mum’s voice break up, but she had taken on both her blessing and the urging to find out everything she could.   
  
Viivi and Tuuri’s few uninterrupted moments on the radio had been spent giving frenzied reassurances to every member of their family. Tuuri listened to Viivi tell Janne, and then Emil, that she was going to be okay. They had to admit they had no idea when they could next be in contact, and Onni’s initially stoic manner trailed off into a reminder that he’d know if they “moved on anywhere” anyway.   
  
“So you will know we’re okay, at least.” Tuuri had tried to chime in with reassurance.   
  
“Well, we’ll know you aren’t _completely_ dead.” Lalli’s correction came from somewhere in the back of the room, barely audible that far from the microphone.     
  
They had received their five-minute warning for the end of their conversation, then a two-minute one. With both faces pressed close to the mic, trying to share a headphone set over two pairs of ears, Tuuri and Viivi had finally ended their conversation in a chorus of goodbyes. While there were still a lot of mixed feelings going on, Tuuri had felt her mind was truly made up after that talk. Now, there was only leaving to do. Through the lace on her shawl, the wind came to remind her of the moment she was in.   
  
Helping to haul some barrels of water into place, Tuuri found herself wondering which of these fellow barrel-handlers would become her friends on the long journey to come. While she’d introduced herself to every member of this crew, the people she’d been translating for were still largely mysterious to her, speaking mostly among themselves. The thought that she might become close to the tall captain Kauri, find a friend in wry Hana, or start to get words out of withdrawn Vainui sparked the first real excitement she’d felt today. Coming back above deck and seeing Sigrun again, still standing on the dock and looking visibly jealous of Tuuri’s fate, was another reminder of why she had signed up for this.   
  
As the boat pulled away, Sigrun stepped forward and provided the kick to get the gangplank into Kauri’s hand. The shore started to fall away from them almost too quickly, even the cries of sea birds starting to fade into the waves as they moved beyond the fjords into the open sea. Viivi brushed past Tuuri while crossing the deck and squeezed her arm. “Here we go, I guess.”   
  
********   
  
In the heat here, your skin always felt warm in a deep and unshiftable way, like dark wood that had been left near sunny glass for hours. The first time Tuuri had felt rain on this ocean, fat drops that fell warm as bathwater, she’d felt like something was quite wrong. Now, after rounding the southern cape of Africa and heading across a broad sea eastwards, the warm rain had started to feel usual. It fell so thick and hard that members of the crew could strip off and bathe in it. Attempting that was how Viivi had found the bumpy red patch on her neck, and when Tuuri had rushed out to see what the scream of horror was about, her shirt had been soaked flat against her skin by the time Viivi had managed to voice her distress.   
  
Under the deck, Tuuri relayed Hana’s verdict to Viivi with a sense of huge relief. “No, there’s no known difference in how immunity works across the world. Hana says it’s almost definitely just the fruit we brought on board yesterday.”   
  
“The mangoes? But I ate them and felt fine!” Viivi started to agitatedly itch at the patch of skin where the rash was, and Hana poked at her offending hand, making a noise of disapproval.   
  
“Yes, she says you can eat the fruit and still be allergic to the sap on the stems, and it looks like that.”   
  
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding!” Viivi’s reaction was such a turnaround that everyone in earshot snorted or jumped. Tuuri had learned, over the course of Viivi meeting every insect in the tropics, exactly which situations made her sound like her dad. “I mean, good... but that’s not how plants are meant to _work_! This is the new sizes of spider all over again...”   
  
“Is she having a scorpion moment?” Hana was repressing a smile.   
  
“Basically.” Tuuri did have to agree with Viivi’s general assessment of some of the insects they’d encountered so far. Some of them were just wildly unfair. At least Tuuri had the good fortune of being a bit more sun-resistant than her sister. When they’d first run into what Tuuri would come to think of as “the real sunshine”, she’d burned nearly as badly as Viivi had, but had soon found herself tanning as deeply as her mum did in a good summer. Viivi had no such luck, and when one shore mission had given her the chance to weave a wide straw hat, she had become instantly and permanently attached to it.   
  
“I do not believe it.” Viivi was speaking directly to Hana now, pausing mid-sentence to remember the verb. While she'd stuck to babbling to Tuuri during her moment of panic, her use of the Māori language in general was growing even faster than Tuuri’s was. Tuuri put it down to a combination of having no other language to rely on, and the amount of time she and Hana spent together.   
  
“The news that you won’t die is awful, I know.” Hana poked Viivi’s hand again as it strayed towards more itching.   
  
The conversation was cut off as the hatchway opened and Vainui’s head appeared upside-down through it, one slim finger on her lips. Sticking more of her torso through, she beckoned with the other hand, and everyone below deck followed it with their eyes when she disappeared back up. Exchanging glances, Tuuri, Hana and Viivi followed with the rest of themselves as well. The rain had cleared, stopping as suddenly as it had started, and the slick boards of the deck gleamed with the colours of the rapidly setting sun. It set so fast here that you could see it moving, and the shadows on the land they’d dropped anchor by were morphing before her eyes. Tuuri had to remind herself not to stare at it during its eerily regular tumble towards the horizon, practically the same time every day.   
  
Their proximity to the land hadn’t only brought them yesterday’s fruit. Many other signs of non-marine life had made themselves obvious. Now perched on the ship’s railings and scattered over the deck was a small flock of birds, of the vague type Tuuri had only ever seen since getting to the north-western coast of Africa. _Parrots_. These were mostly varying shades of green, although their heads looked like they’d stained them by getting too deep into a cup of blueberries. They skittered further along the boat when Tuuri, Viivi and Hana opened the hatch. Tuuri was sure they’d be gone before she could look at them, but they only moved in a few jerky little circles, emitting bell-like calls of _tuink? tuink?_ before landing again.   
  
“Oh, they are so cute.” Viivi whispered.   
  
Hana propped her elbows on the deck and whispered back. “They’d eat this entire boat if they could.” When Viivi looked at her incredulously, clearly unsure if she’d even understood correctly, Hana elaborated with careful little hand motions to illustrate. “We have some in the mountains back home that are bigger than this, and they use all that size to take apart your bins, your windows, your machines…”   
  
Two of the parrots had some kind of argument, beeping with all the rage their feathery little bodies could hold and each trying to chase the other away from their perch. The sharp black shadows grew over the deck another few centimeters, and out of the corner of her eye, Tuuri saw Vainui lighting the ship’s lamps. A clinking from below, people starting to move dinner pans, made the birds jump again. They finally fled as the people dithering on the stairs were shoved out of the way so dinner could be prepared.   
  
Night was almost as warm as day, and while the sea wind was still fresh, it didn’t touch the space below deck. Tuuri slept in a hammock in the open air, reassured for now by the clear sky above her and the boat’s natural wards. The stars were different to the ones she had grown up with, something she did not remember to expect when she started out at all. Tuuri had to lie awake for a moment and contemplate them. When she’d started her journey, she’d taken some small comfort in knowing that wherever she was, somewhere everyone she’d grown up with was looking at this same sky. Now, even that wasn’t true. Knowing it felt strange, and lonely, and dizzyingly, heart-openingly wild.   
  
Being full of fried fish and strange, delicious fruit was a compelling pull towards sleep. The rock of the boat, usually invisible to Tuuri now, made just enough tiny creaking noises to lull her into a doze. Elsewhere on the deck, the sound of Viivi’s heavy sleeping breath came and went with the lulls and gusts of the wind. Tuuri’s dreams were of another wide sea, over which shone yet stranger stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who haven't lived around mango trees, yes, it is reasonably common to be horribly allergic to the tree's sap with no reaction to the fruit itself. The parrots Tuuri has found are plum-headed parakeets, endemic to the Indian subcontinent. The parrots Hana mentions are kea, a species native to New Zealand. They stand out for both being the world's only alpine parrots, and for being exceptionally clever and curious - to the point of being to co-ordinate a whole flock into systematically stripping a car.


End file.
